Sunday, August 05, 2012

While the lala crowd over at Tony's has been going on about how its all right folks, the Arctic has been melting at an accelerating pace, and the melt has been pretty much all melt and little circulation. The ice is broken to pieces and floating out there ready for the hammer. Neven has a nice way of showing this by ratioing the sea ice area to the extent to the sea ice extent. 100% would be a compact ice mass with no little bits floating alone out there.

and, as he points out, a cyclone is passing through and wiping out a mess of what is left. Readers of Rabett Run can get an idea of how fast things are happening by comparing the SSMIS maps from Uni Bremen yesterday and today shown above. The Siberia-Alaska edge is simply vanishing.

17 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I was doubtful earlier about a new record, but... http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html shows that if ice area stopped dropping today, it would still have the 6th lowest minimum of all time. With a full month of melting still to go.

So, I'm still going 50/50 on a new record in extent (see IJIS/NSIDC where we're running neck and neck with 2007), but maybe 75/25 on a new record in area?

You can be sure that Tony will look at this image and point out that there is more ice than normal along the far northeastern coast of Siberia. He's gotten really good at denying the reality. He's got to with all the news pouring in.

Your link to what is happening down here seems a bit beyond the topic here of Death of the Arctic.

But thanks for the link it was an interesting presentation.

I did note the comment at the end that it was preliminary with a lot more work to do.

Persistence can certainly be associated with extremes.

However, at the beginning it was also noted that gradients were reduced.

It will first become informative for us laymen once a full analysis is completed and trends noted.

Again it seems the important metric is the bigger picture. Are living conditions improving? This is simpler stuff to absorb and lots of information is available. We have oscillations in this also but when taken in chunks of 30 years or more the trends are clear and positive.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.